You may have heard about the number of programs currently airing on kids’ cartoon platforms Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. Each of them, as of the writing of this article, has three programs. Cartoon Network has Teen Titans Go! A program that started in 2013 and has been ongoing ever since. Regular Show: The Lost Tapes, a new season of a program that ran from 2010 to 2017. And We Baby Bears, a spinoff of a program that ran from 2014 to 2019. There’s no original programming from the 2020s still on Cartoon Network anymore.
The situation is even worse for Nickelodeon, which features SpongeBob, an ongoing program since 1999; The Loud House, an ongoing program since 2016; and The Patrick Star Show, the only program on this list that started in the 2020s and remains ongoing on Nickelodeon, having premiered its first season in 2021 as a spinoff of SpongeBob. There aren’t any original ideas first released after the year 2016 that still exist on these programs.
The Paramount Skydance merger has left these two companies as mere shadows of their former selves due to various factors, including the rise of streaming services, the decline of cable TV, the popularity of kids’ YouTube content like Cocomelon, and the reduction of these studios’ staff to a small fraction of their previous numbers.
PBS Kids also had some of its funding taken, but fortunately they’re still up and running, although they too mostly air repeats. The Disney channel is the only one I can think of that hasn’t had anything bad happen to it, and they air Bluey, which is the current big hit of the kids’ cartoon world.
It’s a sad time to grow up without new dedicated kids’ programming; the overwhelming majority of it is reruns and scraps of programming that started airing during my childhood, and I’m 24 now.
These company mergers primarily benefit those in charge financially. Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon exist because they’re established names. I wish new companies would crop up and make cartoons for streaming services so they could amass a new audience.
Children need dedicated children’s programming, things designed to give children enjoyable childhoods. There are other factors too, like most audiences just not enjoying what cartoons were put out on networks after a certain point; the quality of shows just dropped even with exceptions like Bluey.
Nowadays children just go online with zero restrictions because most parents don’t know how to keep their children away from the wild west of the internet since these children often peer pressure each other into playing what they think is “cool.” That peer pressure has a snowballing effect since most parents would rather not come off as helicopter parents.
The internet is not a safe place for children; YouTube Kids is filled with attention-grabbing garbage designed to keep a toddler’s attention without giving them any valuable information. YouTube will do nothing to stop this because that means stopping a large portion of their engagement revenue, and millennials who don’t know how to properly raise children will leave them with an iPad and YouTube videos designed to lower the attention span of a child so they only look at the metaphorical jingling keys on their screens.
I, for one, will try my best to keep my child on dedicated children’s programming as much as possible until they’re old enough to be trusted with a phone. I hope children’s programming experiences a resurgence one day.
